On behalf of the great Empire State and the
whole family of New York, let me thank
you for the great privilege of being able to address this convention. Please allow me to
skip the stories and the poetry and the temptation to deal in nice but vague rhetoric. Let
me instead use this valuable opportunity to deal immediately with the questions that should
determine this election and that we all know are vital to the American people.

Ten days ago, President Reagan admitted that although some people in
this country seemed to be doing well nowadays, others were unhappy, even worried, about
themselves, their families, and their futures. The President said that he didn't understand
that fear. He said, "Why, this country is a shining city on a hill." And the
President is right. In many ways we are a shining city on a hill.

But the hard truth is that not everyone is sharing in this city's
splendor and glory. A shining city is perhaps all the President sees from the portico of
the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But
there's another city; there's another part to the shining the city; the part where some
people can't pay their mortgages, and most young people can't afford one; where students
can't afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold
for their children evaporate.

In this part of the city there are more poor than ever, more
families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can't find it. Even worse:
There are elderly people who tremble in the basements of the houses there. And there are
people who sleep in the city streets, in the gutter, where the glitter doesn't show. There
are ghettos where thousands of young people, without a job or an education, give their
lives away to drug dealers every day. There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that
you don't see, in the places that you don't visit in your shining city.

In fact, Mr. President, this is a nation -- Mr. President you ought
to know that this nation is more a "Tale of Two Cities" than it is just a
"Shining City on a Hill."

Maybe, maybe, Mr. President, if you visited some more places;
maybe
if you went to Appalachia where some people still live in sheds; maybe if you went to
Lackawanna where thousands of unemployed steel workers wonder why we subsidized foreign
steel. Maybe -- Maybe, Mr. President, if you stopped in at a shelter in Chicago and spoke to
the homeless there; maybe, Mr. President, if you asked a woman who had been denied the
help she needed to feed her children because you said you needed the money for a tax break
for a millionaire or for a missile we couldn't afford to use.

Maybe -- Maybe, Mr. President. But I'm afraid not. Because the truth is, ladies and gentlemen, that this is how we
were warned it would be. President Reagan told us from the very beginning that he believed
in a kind of social Darwinism. Survival of the fittest. "Government can't do
everything," we were told, so it should settle for taking care of the strong
and hope that economic ambition and charity will do the rest. Make the rich richer,
and
what falls from the table will be enough for the middle class and those who are trying
desperately to work their way into the middle class.

You know, the Republicans called it "trickle-down" when Hoover tried
it. Now they call it "supply side." But it's the same shining city for those relative few
who are lucky enough to live in its good neighborhoods. But for the people who are
excluded, for the people who are locked out, all they can do is stare from a
distance at that city's glimmering towers.

It's an old story. It's as old as our history. The difference
between Democrats and Republicans has always been measured in courage and confidence. The
Republicans -- The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of
the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail.
"The strong" -- "The strong," they tell us, "will inherit the land."

We Democrats believe in something else. We democrats
believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we
have more than once. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt lifted himself from his wheelchair to
lift this nation from its knees -- wagon train after wagon train -- to new frontiers of
education, housing, peace; the whole family aboard, constantly reaching out to extend and
enlarge that family; lifting them up into the wagon on the way; blacks and Hispanics, and
people of every ethnic group, and native Americans -- all those struggling to build their
families and claim some small share of America. For nearly 50 years we carried them all to new levels of
comfort, and security, and dignity, even affluence. And remember this, some of
us in this room today are here only because this nation had that kind of
confidence. And it would be wrong to forget that.

So, here we are at this convention to remind ourselves
where we come from and to claim the future for ourselves and for our children. Today our great Democratic Party, which has saved this nation from
depression, from fascism, from racism, from corruption, is called upon to do it again --
this time to save the nation from confusion and division, from the threat of eventual
fiscal disaster, and most of all from the fear of a nuclear holocaust.

That's not going to be easy. Mo Udall is exactly right
-- it
won't be easy. And in order to succeed, we must answer our opponent's polished and
appealing rhetoric with a more telling reasonableness and rationality.

We must win this case on the merits. We must get the American public
to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship to the reality, the hard substance of
things. And we'll do it not so much with speeches that sound good as with speeches
that are good and sound; not so much with speeches that will bring people to their feet as
with speeches that will bring people to their senses. We must make -- We must
make the American people hear our
"Tale of Two Cities." We must convince them that we don't have to settle for two
cities, that we can have one city, indivisible, shining for all of its people.

Now, we will have no chance to do that if what comes out of this
convention is a babel of arguing voices. If that's what's heard throughout the campaign,
dissident sounds from all sides, we will have no chance to tell our message. To succeed
we will have to surrender some small parts of our individual interests, to build a platform
that we
can all stand on, at once, and comfortably -- proudly singing out. We need -- We
need a platform we can all agree to so that we can sing out the truth for the nation to
hear, in chorus, its logic so clear and commanding that no slick Madison Avenue commercial, no amount of
geniality, no martial music will be able to muffle the sound of the truth.

And we Democrats
must unite. We Democrats must unite so that the entire nation can unite, because
surely the Republicans won't bring this country together. Their policies divide the nation
into the lucky and the left-out, into the royalty and the rabble. The Republicans are
willing to treat that division as victory. They would cut this nation in half, into those
temporarily better off and those worse off than before, and they would call that division
recovery.

Now, we should not -- we should not be embarrassed or dismayed or chagrined
if the process of unifying is difficult, even wrenching at times. Remember that, unlike
any other Party, we embrace men and women of every color, every creed, every orientation,
every economic class. In our family are gathered everyone from the abject poor of Essex
County in New York, to the enlightened affluent of the gold coasts at both ends of the
nation. And in between is the heart of our constituency -- the middle class, the people
not rich enough to be worry-free, but not poor enough to be on welfare; the middle class
--
those people who work for a living because they have to, not because some psychiatrist
told them it was a convenient way to fill the interval between birth and eternity. White
collar and blue collar. Young professionals. Men and women in small business desperate for
the capital and contracts that they need to prove their worth.

We speak for the minorities who have not yet entered the mainstream.
We speak for ethnics who want to add their culture to the magnificent mosaic that is
America. We speak -- We speak for women who are indignant that this nation refuses to etch
into its governmental commandments the simple rule "thou shalt not sin against
equality," a rule so simple --

I was going to say, and I perhaps dare not but I will.
It's a commandment so simple it can be spelled in three letters: E.R.A.

We speak -- We speak for young people demanding an education and a future. We
speak for senior citizens. We speak for senior citizens who are terrorized by the idea that their only
security, their
Social Security, is being threatened. We speak for millions of reasoning people fighting
to preserve our environment from greed and from stupidity. And we speak for reasonable
people who are fighting to preserve our very existence from a macho intransigence that
refuses to make intelligent attempts to discuss the possibility of nuclear holocaust with
our enemy. They refuse. They refuse, because they believe we can pile missiles so high
that they will pierce the clouds and the sight of them will frighten our enemies into
submission.

Now we're proud of this diversity as Democrats. We're grateful for
it. We don't have to manufacture it the way the Republicans will next month in Dallas, by
propping up mannequin delegates on the convention floor. But we, while we're proud of this
diversity, we pay a price for it. The different people that we represent have
different points of view. And sometimes they compete and even debate, and even argue.
That's what our primaries were all about. But now the primaries are over and it is time,
when we pick our candidates and our platform here, to lock arms and move into this campaign
together.

If you need any more inspiration to put some small part of your own difference
aside to create this consensus, then all you need to do is to reflect on what the Republican
policy of divide and cajole has done to this land since 1980. Now the President has asked
the American people to judge him on whether or not he's
fulfilled the promises he made four years ago. I believe, as Democrats, we ought to
accept that challenge. And just for a moment let us consider what he has said and what
he's done.

Inflation -- Inflation is down since 1980, but not because of the supply-side miracle
promised to us by the President. Inflation was reduced the old-fashioned way: with a
recession, the worst since 1932. Now how did we -- We could have brought inflation down that way. How did he
do it? 55,000 bankruptcies; two years of massive unemployment; 200,000 farmers and ranchers forced off the land;
more homeless -- more homeless than at any time since
the Great Depression in 1932; more hungry, in this world of enormous affluence, the
United States of America, more hungry; more poor, most of them women. And -- And he paid one
other thing, a nearly 200 billion dollar deficit threatening our future.

Now, we must make the American people understand this deficit because
they don't. The President's deficit is a direct and dramatic repudiation of his promise
in 1980 to
balance the budget by 1983. How large is it? The deficit is the largest in the history of
the universe. It -- President Carter's last budget had a deficit less than one-third of this
deficit. It is a deficit that, according to the President's own fiscal adviser, may grow
to as much 300 billion dollars a year for "as far as the eye can see."
And, ladies and gentlemen, it is a debt so large -- that is almost
one-half of the money we collect from the personal income tax each year goes
just to pay the interest. It is a
mortgage on our children's future that can be paid only in pain and that could bring this
nation to its knees.

Now don't take my word for it -- I'm a Democrat. Ask the Republican investment bankers on Wall Street what they think
the chances of this recovery being permanent are. You see, if they're not too embarrassed
to tell you the truth, they'll say that they're appalled and frightened by the
President's deficit. Ask them what they think of our economy, now that it's been driven
by the distorted value of the dollar back to its colonial condition. Now we're exporting
agricultural products and importing manufactured ones. Ask those Republican investment
bankers what they expect the rate of interest to be a year from now. And ask them
-- if they
dare tell you the truth -- you'll learn from them, what they predict for the inflation rate
a year from now, because of the deficit.

Now, how important is this question of the deficit. Think about it practically: What chance would the Republican
candidate have had in 1980 if he had told the American people that he intended to pay for
his so-called economic recovery with bankruptcies, unemployment, more homeless, more
hungry, and the largest government debt known to humankind? If he had told the
voters in 1980 that truth, would American voters have
signed the loan certificate for him on Election Day? Of course not! That was an election
won under false pretenses. It was won with smoke and mirrors and illusions. And that's the
kind of recovery we have now as well.

But what about foreign policy? They said that they would make us and
the whole world safer. They say they have. By creating the largest defense budget in
history, one that even they now admit is excessive -- by escalating to a frenzy the nuclear
arms race; by incendiary rhetoric; by refusing to discuss peace with our enemies;
by the
loss of 279 young Americans in Lebanon in pursuit of a plan and a policy that no one can
find or describe.

We give money to Latin American governments that murder nuns, and
then we lie about it. We have been less than zealous in support of our only real friend
--
it seems to me, in the Middle East -- the one democracy there, our flesh and blood
ally, the state of Israel. Our -- Our policy -- Our foreign policy drifts with no real direction, other than an
hysterical commitment to an arms race that leads nowhere -- if we're lucky. And if we're
not, it could lead us into bankruptcy or war.

Of course we must have a strong defense! Of course Democrats are for a strong defense. Of course Democrats
believe that there are times that we must stand and fight. And we have. Thousands of us
have paid for freedom with our lives. But always -- when this country has been at its best
-- our purposes were clear. Now they're not. Now our allies are as confused as our enemies.
Now we have no real commitment to our friends or to our ideals -- not to human rights, not
to the refuseniks, not to
Sakharov, not to
Bishop Tutu and the others struggling for
freedom in South Africa.

We -- We have in the last few years spent more than we can afford. We have
pounded our chests and made bold speeches. But we lost 279 young Americans in Lebanon and
we live behind sand bags in Washington. How can anyone say that we are safer, stronger, or
better?

That -- That is the Republican record. That its disastrous quality is not more fully understood by the
American people I can only attribute to the President's amiability and the failure by some
to separate the salesman from the product.

And, now -- now -- now it's up to us. Now it's up
to you and to me to make the case to America. And to remind Americans that if they are not
happy with all that the President has done so far, they should consider how much worse it will
be if he is left to his radical proclivities for another four years unrestrained.
Unrestrained.

Now, if -- if July -- if July brings back
Ann Gorsuch Burford -- what can we expect of
December? Where would -- Where would another four years take us? Where would four years more take us? How
much larger will the deficit be? How much deeper the cuts in programs for the struggling
middle class and the poor to limit that deficit? How high will the interest rates be? How
much more acid rain killing our forests and fouling our lakes?

And, ladies and gentlemen, please think of this
-- the nation must think of this: What kind of Supreme Court will we have?

Please. [beckons
audience to settle down]

We -- We must ask
ourselves what kind of court and country will be fashioned by the man who believes in
having government mandate people's religion and morality; the man who believes that trees pollute the environment; the man
that believes that -- that the laws against discrimination against people go too far;
a man who
threatens Social Security and Medicaid and help for the disabled. How high will we pile
the missiles? How much deeper will the gulf be between us and our enemies? And, ladies and
gentlemen, will four years more make meaner the spirit of the American people? This election will measure the record of the
past four years. But more than that, it will answer the question of what kind of
people we want to be.

We Democrats still have a dream. We still believe in this nation's
future. And this is our answer to the question. This is our credo:

We believe in only the government we need, but we insist on all the
government we need.

We believe in a government that is characterized by fairness and
reasonableness, a reasonableness that goes beyond labels, that doesn't distort or promise
to do things that we know we can't do.

We believe in a government strong enough to use words
like "love" and "compassion" and smart enough to convert our noblest
aspirations into practical realities.

We believe in encouraging the talented, but we
believe that while survival of the fittest may be a good working description of the
process of evolution, a government of humans should elevate itself to a higher order.

We -- Our -- Our government -- Our
government should be able to rise to the level where it can
fill the gaps that are left by chance or by a wisdom we don't fully understand. We would rather have
laws written by the patron of this great city, the man called the "world's most
sincere Democrat," St. Francis of Assisi, than laws written by Darwin.

We believe -- We believe as Democrats, that a society as blessed as
ours, the most affluent democracy in the world's history, one that can spend trillions on
instruments of destruction, ought to be able to help the middle class in its struggle,
ought to be able to find work for all who can do it, room at the table, shelter for the
homeless, care for the elderly and infirm, and hope for the destitute. And we proclaim as
loudly as we can the utter insanity of nuclear proliferation and the need for a nuclear
freeze, if only to affirm the simple truth that peace is better than war because life is
better than death.

We believe in firm -- We believe in firm but fair law and order.

We believe proudly in the
union movement.

We believe in a -- We believe -- We believe in privacy for people, openness by government.

We believe in
civil rights, and we believe in human rights.

We believe in a single -- We believe in a
single fundamental idea that
describes better than most textbooks and any speech that I could write what a proper
government should be: the idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens
for the good of all, feeling one another's pain, sharing one another's blessings
-- reasonably, honestly, fairly, without respect to race, or sex, or geography, or political
affiliation.

We believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the
heart of the matter we are bound one to another, that the problems of a retired school
teacher in Duluth are our problems; that the future of the child -- that the
future of the child in Buffalo is our future; that the struggle of a disabled man in Boston to survive and live decently is our
struggle; that the hunger of a woman in Little Rock is our hunger; that the failure
anywhere to provide what reasonably we might, to avoid pain, is our failure.

Democrats did it -- Democrats did it and Democrats can do it again.
We can build a future that deals with our deficit. Remember this, that 50 years of
progress under our principles never cost us what the last four years of stagnation have.
And we can deal with the deficit intelligently, by shared sacrifice, with all parts of
the nation's family contributing, building partnerships with the private sector, providing
a sound defense without depriving ourselves of what we need to feed our children and care
for our people. We can have a future that provides for all the young of the present,
by marrying common sense and compassion.

We know we can, because we did it for
nearly 50 years before 1980. And we can do it again, if we do not forget -- if we do not forget
that this entire nation has profited by these progressive principles; that they helped
lift up generations to the middle class and higher; that they gave us a chance to work, to go to
college, to raise a family, to own a house, to be secure in our old age and, before that,
to reach heights that our own parents would not have dared dream of.

That struggle to live with dignity is the real story of the shining
city. And it's a story, ladies and gentlemen, that I didn't read in a book, or learn in a
classroom. I saw it and lived it, like many of you. I watched a small man with thick
calluses on both his hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the
bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language,
who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of
his example. I learned about our kind of democracy from my father. And I learned about
our obligation to each other from him and from my mother. They asked only for a chance to
work and to make the world better for their children, and they -- they asked to be protected in
those moments when they would not be able to protect themselves. This nation and this
nation's government did that for them.

And that they were able to build a family and
live in dignity and see one of their children go from behind their little
grocery store in South Jamaica on the other side of the tracks where he was
born, to occupy the highest seat, in the greatest State, in the greatest nation, in the only world we
would know, is an ineffably beautiful tribute
to the democratic process.

And -- And ladies and gentlemen, on January 20, 1985, it will happen
again -- only on a much, much grander scale. We will have a new President of the United
States, a Democrat born not to the blood of kings but to the blood of pioneers and
immigrants. And we will have America's first
woman Vice President, the child of
immigrants, and she -- she -- she will open with one magnificent stroke, a whole new frontier
for the United States.

Now, it will happen. It will happen if we make it happen; if you and I make it
happen. And I ask you now, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, for
the good of all of us, for the love of this great nation, for the family of America, for
the love of God: Please, make this nation remember how futures are built.